LOOM COMMUNICATIONS

About

My name is Seth Morabito, and Loom Communications is my personal
and professional home page.

I've been active online in one way or another since 1992,
and working in the high tech industry since 1995. I'm a
software engineer, hacker, tinkerer, maker, and perpetual
learner.

Projects

These are some of the things I’ve been working on for
fun in my spare time.

Retrochallenge Summer 2013

As always, the purpose of Retrochallenge is to play
around with vintage computer technology in some
way. This year, I chose to build a VT100 keyboard to USB
keyboard converter, so I could use a real VT100 keyboard
on my Mac. The firmware was written in AVR C, and I
learned a lot about the inner workings of a vintage
serial terminal.

I'm very honored that my project was chosen as the
winner for Retrochallenge 2013. More details than you
could ever possibly want
are on
my weblog.

IttyChat

IttyChat
is a light-weight internet chat room built on Node.js
and CoffeeScript. When I say “chat room”, I
mean it in the very retro sense of a Telnet-based chat
room. None of this fancy web business, no sir!

To use IttyChat, you need to start the server, then
telnet in and create a character. Characters are saved
in a SQLite3 database between sessions. There’s a
lot more I'd like to do with this, but with so much
going on, it's been a low priority.

Home Brew Computers

I built a simple 6502-based
personal computer from the ground up, using a
handful of ICs. It's not a complex design, but it offers
simple terminal-based IO and cassette storage. It's
built around a Rockwell R65C02, a 6522 VIA, a 6551 ACIA,
32KB of EPROM, and 32KB of SRAM.

Next plans include a Z80-based system, but it's still
in the breadboard stages.

Retrochallenge Winter Warmup 2013

This was a fun project. My home-brewed 6502 computer
had no capability for mass storage, so I had no way to
save programs. For 2013's Winter Warmup, I chose to
build a cassette storage interface so I could re-live
the awful old days of PRESS PLAY ON TAPE.

Symon
is a 6502 system simulator, written in Java. At its core
is a 6502 CPU emulator, but the simulated system also
includes RAM, ROM, and a simulated 6551 ACIA. It has a
virtual serial terminal connected for I/O. Programs and
ROM images can be loaded and executed. There's a simple
suite of debugging tools, as well.

Symon is fairly rigorously tested, and should be
extremely accurate. At this time there are no known core
6502 emulator bugs, so it can serve as a platform for
6502 software development and testing.

PDP-11/35 Restoration

I've had an unhealthy love for the PDP-11 since
college, when I first laid hands on one that was
destined for the scrappers. Some friends and I nursed
it back to life and played with it over the course of a
couple of semesters.

When I was offered a complete PDP-11/35 last year, I
jumped at the chance. Unfortunately, the machine had
been left in a barn for over a decade and became
infested with mice. It was severely damaged, but I spent
a few months carefully restoring it.